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Crimes of Conversation: How Your Speech Is Sabotaging Your Career

On 'Daily Dose With Jillian Michaels,' Jillian talks with self-help expert Tara Mohr about how certain female speech habits make women appear less competent. Could you be putting your foot in your mouth without even knowing it?

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Imagine you’re applying for a new job — your dream job, the job you’ve waited for your whole life — and the company calls you in for an interview with the boss. It’s the final step in the hiring process, and it’s down to you and one other candidate. You’re nervous, of course, but your resume is exceptional, and you’ve done your homework to prepare for the meeting. When it’s over, you feel pretty good about your chances. Maybe you even start picking out photos to hang on the wall of your new office. But two days later, you get a call from human resources saying they’re sorry but they’ve filled the position and they wish you well in your future endeavors.

So what went wrong?

Maybe a lot of things — things you didn’t even realize you were doing, says career expert Tara Mohr, author of the (free!) workbook “10 Rules for Brilliant Women.” As Mohr explained on a recent episode of Daily Dose With Jillian Michaels, women often unintentionally sabotage themselves in their personal and professional lives by adopting certain bad speech habits that make them seem less competent than they are. We’re all guilty of at least one of these mistakes from time to time, Mohr told Jillian, who admitted to being vulnerable to a few of them herself. The key is being able to recognize them so you can work to fix them.

Here, the four biggest speech snafus women commit:

Discounting what you say before — or after — you say it. “Unfortunately in our culture,” Mohr tells Jillian, “when [women] speak really powerfully and without any apologies, sometimes it makes us come across as less likeable.” As a result, we tend to add disclaimers to our thoughts and feelings: “I’m really not an expert in this, but…” or “I’m just thinking off the top of my head right now, but…” These pre-emptive apologies are unnecessary — and worse than that, they’re counterproductive.

Playing down your opinion or idea before you voice it makes other people less likely to take it seriously, no matter how intelligent or well-reasoned it may be. You can’t tell someone up front that what you have to say isn’t worth hearing and then expect them to listen. You have to be — or at least sound — self-assured, and that means not diminishing your contribution to a conversation. It also means not asking after the fact if what you’ve said makes sense. “In a professional setting,” Mohr explains, “what that sounds like to the listener — and we can all hear this if we think about it — is that the person is feeling like what they said was confusing or unclear.” And if you question it, the person you’re talking with will too.

Overusing “just.”Women too frequently insert this word into their conversations, Mohr says: “I just think,” “I’m just concerned that,” “I just have a few more questions,” etc. In some ways, the “just” effect is similar to the disclaimer effect — it undermines whatever follows. “It [sounds] almost like you’re not deserving of the time, the moment, the thought,” Jillian notes. “[Like] it’s not of value.”

Mohr agrees. “Drop the ‘justs’!” she advises. “It’s such a little thing, but it makes a huge impact… Think about how different it sounds [to say], ‘I’m concerned that’ or ‘I have a few more questions.’” Your opinions are valid — no justs about it.

Turning your statements into questions. This is what’s called “uptalk,” Mohr says — when you raise your pitch at the end of a sentence as if you’re asking rather than telling someone what you think. “What happens for women is that we start doing [this] with our statements,” Mohr explains. “Like, ‘I’m so grateful for this opportunity? Because I think this is going to be really great?’” Sometimes we do it even when we’re communicating simple facts: “I grew up in a small town in Ohio? I went to school in California?”

Uptalk isn’t just a female phenomenon — linguists have been studying the trend in both sexes for decades — but it does appear to be more common among women, particularly those in the younger generations. The bad news, Mohr says, is that it gives the impression that you’re tentative or unsure of what you’re saying. The good news is that you can train yourself to stop doing it. “Ask someone to listen to you and let you know when they hear it,” she suggests. Or study the habits of great speakers to pick up on their patterns. (Jillian recommends the queen of talk herself, Oprah Winfrey.)

Not pausing between sentences. “This is so huge,” Mohr tells Jillian. All people tend to talk in rushed, rambling sentences when they’re nervous, but women are especially vulnerable. “Some people believe this is because women get interrupted a lot in our lives…so we start to compensate by just going, going, going,” she explains. “We want to make sure we get our full thought out.”

The problem with this is that you often get your full thought out but then don’t know when or how to stop, so you end up either going off on an unrelated tangent or revealing more than you originally planned, which takes away focus from your main talking points. It also makes the conversation difficult for your listener, both because it’s harder to follow and because he or she can’t interject with questions or comments. This may be especially disastrous in a professional setting, Mohr notes, not least because it reflects poorly on your communication skills. “We want to be really aware of those pauses,” she advises. “So put a period on the end of your sentence, and sit.”

How many of these mistakes do you make on a regular basis? What’s your speech pattern pet peeve?